Traffic, acquisition, and sales have always been critical priorities for marketers. Yet customer retention also plays a key role—but is too often neglected.

Interestingly, only 49% of small business owners have a customer loyalty or other retention plan in place, according to a Belly survey related to current small business marketing and retention activities. The 429 businesses surveyed represent a range of industries, and they use various marketing tools and solutions.

Here, I'm going to share five findings with the biggest impact for small businesses. I'll also share relevant marketing approaches to help you reach your growth and revenue goals.

1. 72% plan to allocate most of their marketing budget to customer acquisition rather than customer retention

This finding was surprising, considering it costs up to five times more to acquire a new customer than it does to keep one.

Only 28% of merchants surveyed said they were putting most of their budget into customer retention. This is a huge miss according to brand influencer Tamara McCleary, who says existing customers are 50% more likely to try a new product or service from someone they've done business with in the past.

So, how can marketers and business owners drive acquisition without sacrificing retention?

Consider the processes and teams already within your organization. Optimize customer service and experience with upsells that improve the overall buying experience.

Outstanding customer service requires daily interaction with your customers. Training your customer-facing teams with proactive soft-selling skills will help you to serve your customers with new products and services.

A reactive approach to social media is another method for boosting customer retention. Because not everyone will post directly to your social channels with how they feel about your business, you can use tools like Mention to monitor conversations folks are having about your business.

Pay attention to the channels where these conversations are happening. Contribute with guidance in the form of valuable content.

2. Customer loyalty programs, email, and social are considered the most effective marketing channels

We asked 429 businesses where they planned to put their marketing dollars in 2016. These were the top three:

1. Social Media Advertising (63%)
2. Customer Loyalty Program (55%)
3. Email Marketing (50%)

That came as no surprise, since those channels are easy to measure and have strong ROI. Traditional marketing methods are more difficult to measure and are being replaced by digital channels. What can you do to test these digital channels (or optimize them)?

Email continues to prove its worth, but only when it's done well. Consumers today are smart. They know all the tricks used in creating and scheduling mass emails and now prefer transparency and personalization in the messages they receive.

There are 4 billion email accounts worldwide, 25% of which are business-specific, and the average open rate is 20% to 25%. How can you improve upon that metric?

Despite conventional wisdom, a personalized approach doesn't always work. Emails containing the recipient's first name aren't original; many have become immune to that trick. Think about it: Do you put the name of your friend in the subject line when emailing them?

Test an anti-personalized approach by removing all instances of names and other fields. This disrupts the recipient's knee-jerk reaction against marketing.

Marketers have found a new enemy in the form of the "promotions" tab in Gmail and other apps. To get around this hurdle, direct email subscribers to a Thank You page to remind them why they signed up and to keep an eye out for a confirmation email.

If you really want to ensure your subscribers can find your email, add an extra call to action on the Thank You page to send the user straight to that email.

Ensure your emails are optimized for mobile. If you see high opens but a low click-through rate, this could be because your email isn't appearing properly on mobile devices.

Finally, consider social media advertising platforms, including Facebook and Twitter, as these are hyper-targeted and effective paid acquisition channels. You can target your audience to the exact age and location, as well as other demographic and psychographic information.

Test on a small scale first by matching audience to the right message. Know who your personas are, and align your ad copy with their challenges and desires. Use a tool like Perfect Audience to scale this up once you've achieved a positive ROI.

3. 30% of SMBs don't have budget to hire a full-time marketing position

Many SMBs don't prioritize marketing into their budgets because they think they need to hire someone to manage it full-time, which isn't the case, of course. And even business owners who do put budget into marketing activity believe it's hard to measure results.